Victoria Jenkins

Wow! Wow! Wow!

The book was off the hook! There were so many stories going on in here with characters and crime all over the place. I was like WTF is going on? This is cray, cray.

And, I loved it.

The author wrote these side stories without letting you in on who the character is, so you can only guess, and guess, and then try to guess again. I know I was all over the place with my guesses (yeah they were mostly wrong).

The crimes are heinous and will give you the creeps. And the jaw dropping show more ending will have you going "No Way!!"

I love this series and can't wait for the next one!

Thanks to Bookouture and Net Galley for providing me with a free e-galley in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. show less

Favorite Quotes:

Paranoia is different. It is a slippery, malignant thing– feared by those who know of its presence, an invisible threat to those who don’t.

I don’t remember what happiness sounds or tastes like, or how it feels between my fingers.

‘What if’ has been an enemy of mine for as long as I’m able to remember, standing in doorways to stop me passing, whispering in my ear at night to keep me awake. It has been the sibling I never had, competitive and sneaky, tripping me up show more then feigning innocence when I fall. Now, it stands here beside me, taunting me with everything that could go wrong.

My Review:

This was a tense and disconcerting read. But I am not a fan of angst, and I didn’t like these people; they were all rather heinous. Nor could I fully forgive them even after the driving force of their problems was revealed. But while I found them to be contemptible creatures who had done inexcusable things to each other and had knowingly neglected their child, I was unreasonably curious to find out what was going to happen next. Victoria Jenkins has penned a compelling tale. show less

First Line: The body, face down and almost completely submerged in the tea-colored water of the slough, might easily have been mistaken for a driftwood log.

After four years with the LAPD, Irene Chavez has returned to her rural Washington state roots to raise her teenage son. Although there is no overt hostility towards her in the Mason County Sheriff's Department, Irene knows she changes the dynamic and makes several of the men uneasy. She can deal with it.

Especially in times like now, when show more there's an unattended death and everyone else is either on vacation or has full case loads. By default, Irene gets this death-- the probable boating accident/drowning of Anne Paris on her family's summer property on an island in Puget Sound.

As Irene makes her measured, careful way through the investigation and gets to know those closest to the deceased, she is convinced that the boom of a sailboat didn't kill the young psychiatrist, but someone close to her. All she has to do is prove it.

Irene Chavez is definitely a character that I want to see a lot more of. Her background, her self-reliance, her becoming a police officer then a young widow who decides to move her son from Los Angeles to rural Washington state... as Jenkins gradually unfolded Irene's history throughout the narrative, the more I liked her, and the more I wanted to read about her. The relationship between her and her son is a special one that adds so much to the story as does the appearance of a new county attorney who seems interested in her. Irene has closed off many rooms of her life, and as she investigates further into the case of the dead woman, the reader feels one or two of those doors beginning to open. The lure of what lies beyond is tantalizing.

Jenkins' descriptions of life in a remote area on Puget Sound are almost poetic in setting a scene and a mood, and although I knew the identity of the killer the very first time the person was described, it didn't matter. I thoroughly enjoyed the careful plotting, the strong sense of place, and the oh-so-rich character development. I am definitely going to keep both eyes open for another book featuring Detective Irene Chavez! show less

I found this a disappointing book but perhaps I was expecting too much. If you have more than the most basic knowledge of occult and esotoric lore the text will not tell you very much that you did not know already. This is for the very general reader looking into a by-way of art history.

Another limitation is that it is just an excuse to plunder what happens to be in the Tate's own archives by someone who knows them well as an archivist. As a result, it is heavily driven by what is in those show more archives rather than by a desire to explore more extensively occult thought in art.

There is certainly an over-dependence on Ithell Colquohoun (someone genuinely engaged in esoteric thought) and perhaps on Cecil Collins but the overwhelming effect of the book is to suggest, in fact, that genuinely occult thinking plays very little consistent role in art after all.

Is this true? Yes, to some extent insofar as few artists seem to move away from doing into thinking and much of occult practice is driven, in fact, by ritual, language, text and theory or even ideology than by the artistic 'object'. The 'work' is the person themselves and not their product.

The artist often creates themselves through their product, moving on quite quickly from one object to another (and, in this sense, they are occult) but the process is deliberately untheoretical in such cases, a case of doing in order to become.

Occultists are engaged in a process that is more highly conscious of such things as lineages, tradition, initiation, secrecy, performance (more like theatre in this respect) and, above all, 'gnosis'. The 'work' is centred on the person as process where the 'thrown-away-once-done' is the ritual.

Artistic occulture or occult artistry consciously centre the process on physical works (unless we count ritual as performance art) so that is what we should be looking out for. Not art as psychotherapy but art as consciously directed creation where there are 'forces' to be harnessed.

Aleister Crowley's drawing of Lam (not in the Book) may not be great art but it is genuinely occult. Leonora Carrington's 'Elohim' (in the book and in Tate Modern) is art and reaches out with authenticity to the occult, that which is hidden behind things and is more than the 'subconscious'.

These are fine points but it is not enough to claim that someone who paints witches like Goya is interested in the occult. Rather they are interested in fear or folklore or popular memes or the market. The book does not, for example, include the work of the witch Rosaleen Norton.

It could be argued that I have missed the point - a great deal of art is intrinsically occult and inexplicable to the lay person, a process of creation in which material is alchemically transformed into meaning. Still, our interest should be in artists who deliberatively reflect on this aspect of their work.

Most artists may be engaged in an occult practice without realising that they are. They have, of course, their own art school and peer group initiatory processes with some who, like the dark magician Francis Bacon, seem to leap into creation largely from outside such tradition.

A serious book of the occult in art might simply be an investigation into the creative process but that is not what we needed here. Instead, the book should have been focusing much more on artists with a sense of that process coming not just from within but from the hidden world.

In other words, occulture is not (for example) surrealism (until that moment when surrealism engages with Jungian archetypes) because it is not about psychology but about the hidden wellsprings (in the eyes of the artist) of creation within existence itself, perhaps in the Being of Being.

The question should have been not does this or that artist portray witches but is this or that artist a witch? Or not whether an artist designs tarot cards to order but do they imbue those designs with deeper meaning? Do they consciously transfer an alchemical mind-set into their work?

Then again, there should be some distinction made between the construction of occult themes in popular culture (as in the design of record covers or in cinema for effect) and the expression of the occult in the artist (as in Colquhoun) or through a cinematic auteur.

'Visions of the Occult' has difficulty drawing the boundaries between 'illustration' of text (the author seems to have recognised that sticking in Sutherland's 'Ram Heads' to make a point was 'mauvaise foi') and 'example' of occult art and between occult art creation and popular use of occult illustration.

In short, what we should want is a book not about occult representations from multiple social viewpoints (there is a lot of this available in any case) but a book about occulture itself and its lineages, influences, drives and social context.

Of course we will probably find that occulture is as marginal in fact as, say, outsider art but it is there and it needs to be understood critically, including its obvious failings, as more than illustrations for 'Man, Myth and Magic'.

Many of the items offered in this book have been force fed into a very broad definition of the occult to mean things simply irrational and strange, even New Age. In fact, the occult is much circumscribed than this - it presupposes not strange things in the world but what is behind them.

If the occult is not necessarily Surrealism, it is also not Forteanism. It is not Arthur C. Clarke's magic as undiscovered science. It is not pseudo-science. It is not necessarily counter-culture or psychedelics. It is not simply the irrational.

As a smaller-scale coffee table book with some very nice pictures illustrative of its theme, it comes across well enough. I would certainly not discourage anyone from owning it if that is what is required but as a serious investigation of the occult in art it does not pass muster at all.

If the text had spent less time regurgitating a primer on occult themes (with added 'woke' in places as is customary today) and more time on searching out the occult thought processes of those artists who were aware of these things themselves as 'serious endeavour', it would have been more useful.

It is a pleasant enough book that will be educative as a basic primer to those who know absolutely nothing of occulture and it will introduce the reader to works not easily seen (which is a service) but it will not tell him or her much about occult artistic practice and art's role in occult practice. show less